For environmentalists “agriculture” can be something of a dirty word, associated with other words such as, pesticides, water consumption, pollutants, and deforestation. Not all environmentalists have these negative associations, though. Some, like my guest today, are working to re-fashion agricultural practices so that they actually help to reverse environmental damage. This week on Sea Change Radio we are speaking with Joe Brewer, an American ex-pat living  and working in the regenerative agriculture space in Colombia. We discuss his family’s journey to this small but vibrant farming community, the lessons he’s learned, and how those lessons can be scaled to bigger farms in the U.S.

Narrator  0:01  This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.

Joe Brewer  0:16  Because it's a small town, all of these people are friends. So the idea is for this money to support the network of these local people, to coordinate their projects with each other and to create new projects. And all the while be learning and sharing what we're learning back to everyone in the world who cares to learn through our global network and through the different media outlets that we have to share our story.

Narrator  0:42  For environmentalists, agriculture can be something of a dirty word, associated with other words such as pesticides, water consumption, pollutants, and deforestation. Not all environmentalists have these negative associations though. Some, like my guest today are working to refashion agricultural practices so that they actually help to reverse environmental damage. This week on Sea Change Radio, we're speaking with Joe Brewer, an American expat living and working in the regenerative agriculture space in Colombia. We discuss his family's journey to this small but vibrant farming community, the lessons he's learned, and how those lessons can be scaled to bigger farms in the US.

Alex Wise  1:48  I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Joe Brewer. Joe is joining us from Barichara, Columbia. He is a complexity scientist and an environmentalist. Joe, welcome to Sea Change Radio.

Joe Brewer 1:59  Thanks so much, Alex. It's awesome to be here with you.

Alex Wise  2:03  So explain what you're doing in Barichara, I you grew up on a chicken farm in Missouri, I believe and this is more than a stone's throw away from there. Explain what you're involved in what you've created in Barichara.

JB  2:16  Yes, maybe I'd start this way by saying just a little less than four years ago, something absolutely transformational happened, which is my wife and I had a child, we have a little daughter, who's about to turn four. And she is a big reason why we are in Colombia now. And the story could be summarized like this. We my wife and I are both what we would call collapse aware, environmentally minded people who see the level of crisis that humanity is in the kinds of dangers on the horizon, and how big the mismatches between what needs to happen and what's generally being done. And so we spent about a year through a set of work connections I had, we spent about a year living off grid, and a biodiversity hotspot, and a tropical rainforest in Costa Rica. And during that time, I was helping to envision a different way of creating local economic systems, so that the economies could be in harmony with their environment. And we are doing this by visiting projects in Costa Rica, and helping to build a planetary scale network of places where people were trying to do this. And that network is called the regenerative communities network, hosted by an organization based in Connecticut, called capital Institute. So I was on the team at Capital Institute,